Message 4: Design Politics (Graphic Communication Design Research)

My paper “Rethinking Graphic Design and the Design of Historical Arguments” was published in Message, a journal dedicated to visual communication research based at the University of Plymouth in the UK.

When I started working full time in academia I realized that I was many years behind in reading design scholarship that was important to the kinds of questions I wanted to answer through my writing. Writing this paper took me a long time. This is officially my first academic paper and for some time I didn’t even think I would be able to write it, especially in English. Part of the motivation to think about graphic design/visual communication and its place within academic disciplines comes from a sense of disempowerment I often felt when working as a designer working with content developed by others. Writing this article was also an opportunity to talk about projects and it was a chance to articulate the motivations behind my work.

The journal is Open Access and can be downloaded here.